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"SWAT teams traditionally have been there to diffuse potentially violent confrontations" Your news is about 30 years out of date. Since the late 80s, there ha

"SWAT teams traditionally have been there to diffuse potentially violent confrontations" Your news is about 30 years out of date. Since the late 80s, there has been a massive increase in the use of paramilitary police teams to serve basic search-and-arrest warrants. SWAT was used against hackers in the 90s, it is routinely used to prosecute drug cases (perhaps most famously), and of course against protesters. What has changed in the last decade is that paramilitary teams can be seen simply standing by in public places; whenever I visit my family in NYC, I see paramilitary teams. Once I even saw a heavily armed SWAT team in Greenwich Village, apparently guarding a bank (or maybe the newspaper stand near it). You are right that it is disturbing, but this has been happening for a long time. The past decade's increase is part of a trend that has been occurring since I was in diapers. Sadly, most people believe that we need SWAT and that it is entirely acceptable to use paramilitary teams in this manner. There is also a shocking lack of transparency in many places, where the police need not disclose how often paramilitary teams are deployed nor why they choose to use such teams.

codex 13y ago
Incidents like this one don't help, where bank robbers wore full suits of body armor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout ... probably because they expected SWAT. It's a bit of an arms race, literally, between the cops and the robbers.
- betterunix 13y ago
  That is also an exceedingly rare crime. It would have been acceptable to let the robbers get away, and then catch them later (if at all). Our cities are not war zones (thankfully). To put it another way, this is no different from saying that the police should be armed with anti-aircraft missiles, because of the 9/11 attacks.
  - cglee 13y ago
    It's rare because police can handle it now. If you let head to toe kevlar robbers get away all the time, well, you'll have a lot of those types of attacks.
    - dantheman 13y ago
      It's rare because bank robberies are rare and are usually done by people who can't afford kevlar gear and you'll most like get caught.
    - betterunix 13y ago
      It was rare before SWAT, before the LAPD carried AR-15s in their patrol cars, and before it occurred. It is just a rare crime, even in a large city. I think the theory that there would be copycats is easily disproved: this was their third bank robbery, yet there were no copycats following the first two, nor following their successful armored truck robberies. Those crimes occurred over a period of several years, more than enough time for a copycat to get the guns and armor. On the other hand, paramilitary police teams targeting the wrong house or killing innocent people happens with frequency. It happens every year. Even if only 1/1000th of the raids that occur each year were done in error, you would expect about 40 such mistakes to occur per year. SWAT teams do not need to hide their existence, they are rarely punished for attacking innocent people, and they exist even in small towns.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      I wonder if with a slightly less thuggish police there would also be less killings of innocent people? Who knows what the bottom line would be.
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      Yeah, they showed a lot of improvement in the Dorner case.
  - hga 13y ago
    Nowadays, the police shotgun, with a maximum effect range of 100 yards shooting a slug that can be stopped by soft body armor, is largely being replaced by the much more versatile and accurate "police carbine", i.e. an AR-15. Only hard plates will stop the .233/5.56 NATO rounds those shoot, and they're way too heavy to do more than protect some of your torso. The Hollywood Shootout, as the link notes, had "Several officers also appropriated AR-15 rifles from a nearby firearms dealer." and mentions how this incident propelled the move to patrol carbines. (Given how obnoxious they were afterwords about returning them, the gun dealer should have insisted they come back after the normally mandatory 2 week waiting period....)
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  >Incidents You mean there is another one? There is no justification for the widespread militarization of police in this country.

codex 13y ago

Incidents like this one don't help, where bank robbers wore full suits of body armor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout ... probably because they expected SWAT. It's a bit of an arms race, literally, between the cops and the robbers.

betterunix 13y ago
That is also an exceedingly rare crime. It would have been acceptable to let the robbers get away, and then catch them later (if at all). Our cities are not war zones (thankfully). To put it another way, this is no different from saying that the police should be armed with anti-aircraft missiles, because of the 9/11 attacks.
- cglee 13y ago
  It's rare because police can handle it now. If you let head to toe kevlar robbers get away all the time, well, you'll have a lot of those types of attacks.
  - dantheman 13y ago
    It's rare because bank robberies are rare and are usually done by people who can't afford kevlar gear and you'll most like get caught.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    It was rare before SWAT, before the LAPD carried AR-15s in their patrol cars, and before it occurred. It is just a rare crime, even in a large city. I think the theory that there would be copycats is easily disproved: this was their third bank robbery, yet there were no copycats following the first two, nor following their successful armored truck robberies. Those crimes occurred over a period of several years, more than enough time for a copycat to get the guns and armor. On the other hand, paramilitary police teams targeting the wrong house or killing innocent people happens with frequency. It happens every year. Even if only 1/1000th of the raids that occur each year were done in error, you would expect about 40 such mistakes to occur per year. SWAT teams do not need to hide their existence, they are rarely punished for attacking innocent people, and they exist even in small towns.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    I wonder if with a slightly less thuggish police there would also be less killings of innocent people? Who knows what the bottom line would be.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    Yeah, they showed a lot of improvement in the Dorner case.
- hga 13y ago
  Nowadays, the police shotgun, with a maximum effect range of 100 yards shooting a slug that can be stopped by soft body armor, is largely being replaced by the much more versatile and accurate "police carbine", i.e. an AR-15. Only hard plates will stop the .233/5.56 NATO rounds those shoot, and they're way too heavy to do more than protect some of your torso. The Hollywood Shootout, as the link notes, had "Several officers also appropriated AR-15 rifles from a nearby firearms dealer." and mentions how this incident propelled the move to patrol carbines. (Given how obnoxious they were afterwords about returning them, the gun dealer should have insisted they come back after the normally mandatory 2 week waiting period....)
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
>Incidents You mean there is another one? There is no justification for the widespread militarization of police in this country.